Much Abrew: Boom Bust Boros (Modern)
Hello, everyone! Welcome to another episode of Much Abrew About Nothing. There's nothing in Magic like blowing up your opponent's lands and getting flawless victories. If you know anything about the history of land destruction in Magic, you'll know that Sinkhole is the best land-destruction spell ever printed. The problem is that Sinkhole is so good that Wizards hasn't printed it into Modern. Well, today, we're building our own Sinkhole with the help of indestructible lands and Boom // Bust! Can we pick up some flawless victories in Modern with a bunch of land destruction and the combo of Nahiri, the Harbinger and Emrakul, the Aeons Torn to close out the game? Let's get to the video and find out in this week's Much Abrew About Nothing!
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Much Abrew: Boom Bust Boros
Discussion
- Record-wise, we ended up 4-1 with Boom Bust Boros but in a somewhat strange way. We had a bit of a deck-building punt in our first match. When I was putting the deck together on Magic Online, I tried to switch out some ugly basics for full-art basics but forgot to remove the old ones, so we joined our league with a 62-card special with two extra basic lands. Even though we won, I didn't want to play the entire league this way, so I ended up dropping and playing some two-player matches to finish the video.
- Maybe the most surprising part of the deck is just how consistent it was at turning Boom // Bust into Sinkhole. Thanks to Flagstones of Trokair, Rustvale Bridge, and Cascading Cataracts, we have a ton of lands that we can blow up with Boom that don't actually put us down a land, enough that it felt like we almost always had access to a Sinkhole by Turn 2 or, at worst, 3. Maybe even more surprising is that we actually used the six-mana Armageddon Bust side of Boom // Bust multiple times to pick up flawless victories!
- Backing up Boom // Bust are a bunch of other ways to blow up lands. Pillage does it directly. We can also use Karn, the Great Creator to grab Liquimetal Coating from our sideboard, which turns Abrade into another Sinkhole. Plus, we can use Liquimetal Coating with Karn's +1 to destroy one of our opponent's lands each turn, essentially locking our opponent out of the game.
- One of the things I really liked about the build is that Nahiri, the Harbinger and Emrakul, the Aeons Torn give us a fast way to finish the game. We've seen some Boros land-destruction decks in the past that were really good at blowing up lands but incredibly slow at actually killing the opponent. The problem with the slow plan is that it gives the opponent a ton of time to draw more lands and get back into the game. In Boom Bust Boros, we can just tick up Nahiri a couple of times and then annihilate our opponent with honorary land-destruction spell Emrakul, the Aeons Torn, which typically wins the game on the spot.
- Our matches against Living End were pretty interesting. We used the not-all-that-intuitive line of evoking Fury with nothing on the battlefield for it to be killed, just to get it in the graveyard, so that we would have something to reanimate if our opponent resolved a Living End, and it worked! In one game, our opponent cast a Shardless Agent and chose not to cast Living End with the cascade because the Fury we'd get back would undo most of their reanimation. While it feels really odd to pitch a Fury for no value, it might actually be the right play against Living End, at least in some situations.
- Our one loss came to Affinity, which is actually pretty hilarious because Affinity feels like it should be one of our best matchups. Karn, the Great Creator locks most of Affinity's mana, and we've got a ton of random artifact-destruction spells to support the Liquimetal Torque / Liquimetal Coating plan. Maybe "one land, one keep" isn't the best rule for mulliganing after all...
- So, should you play Boom Bust Boros in Modern? If you like blowing up lands and picking up flawless victories, I think the answer is pretty clearly yes! The deck is fun to play (and miserable for opponents to play against); plus, it also felt pretty competitive!
